If you do a lot of read/write cycles. I have some 10 year old flash drives that are still readable. (64mb )

They generally have a 10 year data retention rating. Yours still work, because they have extra memory, and perform wear leveling. You will have failures that you don't see, because it reconstructs the data from the ECC info, and moves it to a new page in the 'extra' page blocks on the device. So it'll work fine....until it runs out of extra pages.

I have an AWS account still (tried using it for "anywhere" data and it sucked) but I haven't used it in at least 3 years.

I just read up a little on what RAID is. I understand that depending on what RAID I want, I would need to have between 2-4 drives. They all need to be the same capacity and have the same specs, right?

I don't understand if I need the NAS for it to work? I don't want it to be available on the internet or home network.

So if I bought 4 4tb drives on level RAID 10 that would give me total storage of 8tb?

How is this better than just making 2 backups on 2 drives? You still have the possibility of drive failure. If one drive on the RAID fails, do you need to find a drive with same specs to replace it with?

Hard drives are hit 'n miss but in my experience, WD Red are garbage. The RE4 are better but overpriced. Seagate has been crap for a while. Samsung was decent for a while.... I've had best luck with Hitachi and Toshiba.

You don't want RAID. When RAID arrays go up in smoke and you don't have a backup it's a lot more expensive for data recovery services. Go with large single disks. Be wise and perform regular backups no matter which you choose.

put everything on DVD discs. protect them with your life in vacuum packaging in a class 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000 clean room. submerse in oil, and put it in a safe that's in safe, that's in a safe. 3000' underground.

I'll just add that the reviews and owner feedback of reds don't support schweebs uber smart advice. Do your own research before doling out your pennies. Perhaps they have great RMA service at Western Digital but you aren't supposed to pay full retail to continuously send back your hard drives.

I'll just add that the reviews and owner feedback of reds don't support schweebs uber smart advice. Do your own research before doling out your pennies. Perhaps they have great RMA service at Western Digital but you aren't supposed to pay full retail to continuously send back your hard drives.

Really? Because on Amazon, there are only 34 1 star reviews out of 624 reviews for the 3TB drives. There are only 64 reviews below 4 stars. Tomshardware and many other sites wholeheartedly recommend them, and haven't amended their reviews due to high failure rates.

Please provide evidence that isn't from a forum (we all know people post extremely anecdotal, secondhand, or even falsified evidence on forums). Also, don't quote NewEgg, because their reviews tend to be extremely negative in my experience.

I've never seen/heard of significant issues on REDs if you use them within their designed usage profile - NAS.

My career is storage, so I do have some idea of what I'm talking about. Even the best drives have failures, and even arrive DOA.

I've purchased 3 myself, after quite a bit of research, and they all work fine.

I just read up a little on what RAID is. I understand that depending on what RAID I want, I would need to have between 2-4 drives. They all need to be the same capacity and have the same specs, right?

I don't understand if I need the NAS for it to work? I don't want it to be available on the internet or home network.

With traditional RAID, you're stuck with the lowest common denominator. i.e. if you have 1x100G and 1x200G in a mirror (RAID-1), you only get 100G of usable space (100G is used for the mirror, 100G is forfeited). If you have 1x100G and 2x200G in RAID-5, you get effectively 200G of usable space (100G is used by parity, 200G (100 per drive) is forfeited)... in comparison 3x100G in RAID 5 yields 200G usable.

Drobo (and I believe Synology, maybe others) have a pseudo RAID that allows you to put disparate drives in, and it comes up with a protection strategy to use as much space as possible on the drives, while still protecting the data via mirror or parity.

My recommendation would be to put it on your home network, so it backs up independently of your OS, but Drobo has a 5D model that can be connected via USB/thunderbolt.

I like the Drobo over synology for some reason, but the cost seems a bit high. For 4-5tb, synology is $600 and up and Drobo about $1000 and up.

I don't want it to be on a network (so i can protect it from a virus, etc.). I think that's why I like Drobo.

How long can I expect this setup to last? Physically/functionally?

Technically it'll last nearly indefinitely, you may have to replace drives sporadically if they fail. The drives have 3yr warranty, the Drobo has 2 yr warranty.

You don't really have to protect them from viruses... just ensure that anything touching them (your laptop, desktop) has anti-virus on it.

I have a Drobo 5N, 3x 3TB RED drives, and 2x 1TB random drives... Works extremely well. I probably should have bought the Synology, though - it has a few features I'd find useful.

The Drobo is as simple as connecting your (USB|Thunderbolt|Network) cable, installing the console on your computer, popping the drives in, and clicking a few buttons. The Synology may be slightly more involved.

The DroboApps for backup are called "Copy" or "Elephant Drive", if you want to research cost.

If it were me, I honestly would look into trimming that data volume down and spending less. But, if you legitimately want to protect that much data, it will cost you. If you don't want to pay, you should reconsider how important the data is.

..... When RAID arrays go up in smoke and you don't have a backup it's a lot more expensive for data recovery services. Go with large single disks. Be wise and perform regular backups no matter which you choose.

This is a good point. So what program(s) would you guys recommend for performing the backup? And where do you store the backup, another USB drive?

I'm considering adding a NAS drive to act like a server on my network but if that drive fails I don't want to loose everything. Right now I have one large USB drive with everything on it, not backed up which scares me.